The significance of the date of the Seattle Earthquake Conference would have been ample, had it merely followed the 102nd anniversary of the great San Francisco Earthquake.  As is my personal habit, I was at Lotta’s Fountain, at 3rd and Market Street in San Francisco, at 5:12 a.m. with a crowd of several hundred people that included San Francisco’s esteemed fire chief, Joanne Hayes-White, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and special guest Herbert Hamrol, who is the only living survivor that was able to make the morning’s commemoration.  At age 105, Hamrol still works at Andronico’s grocery store in San Francisco, stocking shelves one day a week, and is bright and articulate, recalling how his mother carried him down the steps of their house the morning of the great quake.

I conducted interviews with several television and radio stations, and as always, sounded the 'hue and cry' for increased preparation and mitigating of the dangers that face us all.

But the middle days of April 2008 did much of our work for us.

Three days before the April 18 commemorative, federal and state scientists had issued the most ominous warnings yet about the probability of a major earthquake along California’s 800 mile San Andreas Fault.

In the past, predictions had usually focused on one of the three main sections, individually:  North (where the 1906 magnitude 7.9 occurred), Central (the Central Valley) or South (east of Los Angeles to the Salton Sea in northern Imperial County).   But the newest predictions looked at the San Andreas Fault in its entirety, and the view was not pretty.

Scientists are now saying there is a 99% chance – that’s not a misprint – of a magnitude 6.7 temblor somewhere along the San Andreas Fault IN THE NEXT 30 YEARS.   That’s a dire prophecy.

There is an even more ominous probability, they state, a 46 % chance, of a magnitude 7.5 event in the next 30 years.  

The former, a 6.7, depending on duration and location, would produce enormous damage, injury and numerous deaths.  The latter – a 7.5 – would be the largest seismic event in the U.S. since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and produce billions of dollars in damage, destroy tens of thousands of homes and structures, and produce deaths that could easily reach into the thousands.  If followed by the residual effect – the fires which destroyed 29,000 buildings in San Francisco alone in 1906 – again as the result of ruptured gas mains -- the prospects would be dire.

The state of California – by itself the world’s 5th most productive economy – could be out of business for an extended period of time.  And if its 1,600 miles of levees fail, disrupting water delivery from the High Sierra to thirsty Southern California, with accompanying failure of the Hetch Hetchy’s 267 miles of tunnels and aqueducts that serve San Francisco, as many as 25 million people will be without drinking water.
 
Once again, we are forewarned and unprepared.  

But the story does not stop there: the middle of April 2008 may go down as the time the nation reached out to warn us all.

As I returned to my room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco the morning of April 18, I received messages from Winning Strategies in New Jersey, the public relations firm that assists ProtectingAmerica.org in carrying our message.  'Certainly,' the voice of Noah Lichtman stated on my hotel message service, 'you’ve heard about the earthquake in Southern Illinois this morning.'

I had not: no one at the commemorative services has their cell phones on, except for the mayor and fire chief, and all the interviews I had done were about San Francisco.

Now the media in the Midwest wanted to speak with me.  Two years prior, I had done a six city tour along the New Madrid Fault Line, trying to wake up our friends and neighbors in Memphis, Nashville, Little Rock, Louisville, Evanston and St. Louis.

Reporters from the Chicago Tribune phoned me, and a few days later, I did an 18 minute interview with WIND in Chicago.

It was obvious from everyone’s voice that the 5.2 temblor, and several significant aftershocks, had rattled the nerves of much of the state of Illinois: the effects, I am told, were felt over 11 states.

'What about the high rise buildings,' the reporter from WIND asked me, 'buildings like Chicago’s Sear’s Tower?'  I explained that I was not a structural engineer, but knew that high rise buildings usually fare well in earthquakes: most are built to withstand gale force winds and the impact of a jumbo jet.  'It’s the smaller, older buildings,' I explained.  'The unreinforced masonry buildings that are so prevalent in large American cities.'   I explained that, on our New Madrid Tour, I saw hundreds of bridges spanning the Mississippi River, and was aware that virtually none was built to seismic standards.

A 5.2 event in the Midwest, I stated, was like a 6.2 event in California: most of the soil east of the Rockies is soft, alluvial material that amplifies seismic waves.  The 1811/1812 New Madrid quake was felt over an area 20 times the area affected by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. 

So the week got off with a 'bang,' bad pun intended.  It gave the earthquake conference a sense of urgency that was not lost on the 1,500 attendees.

On Wednesday, I will post 'Part II' on the conference itself, and what is being done to prepare for the inevitable.

James Dalessandro, ProtectingAmerica.org, May 5, 2008